While on his daily commute in New York City, Pakistani poet Noor Mohammad Danish, better known by his pen name Noon Meem Danish, would absentmindedly count different races on board his bus. Three white people, two Latinos, 10 Black folks, he would enumerate. But one morning he had a sudden realization.
“When it came to Black people, I would not count myself. I used to think, well I am Pakistani, I speak Urdu. And I forgot that I was Black in my face. I felt that I was forgetting myself. When someone sees my complexion, of course they will think I am Black,” he told New Lines.
“I realized I was mentally colonized, that I had forgotten an identity. In Pakistan, I would consider myself a brown or colored person. But actually, I am Black, I am just like these people on the bus. America had its own role to play in seeing how I was deceiving myself,” he said. In Pakistan, he was trying to assimilate, but in the U.S., he realized he could allow himself to be part of a larger Black community.
Perhaps it is surprising that Danish could forget his Blackness like this, given his reputation. For he has forged a career through close attention to such issues in society and throughout the world and has quietly carved out a unique space as possibly the only Black Urdu poet working within the global Negritude tradition, a transnational literary and political movement across the African diaspora.
Born in Karachi’s politically charged Lyari neighborhood and now based in Connecticut, Danish’s poetry confronts themes of race, identity, belonging and political resistance, drawing on his lived experience as a Black citizen of Pakistan. Even though he has published only one book, “Bache, Titli, Phool” (“Children, Butterflies, Flowers”), the 67-year-old Danish has been published by numerous Urdu literary journals, including the notable Shabkhoon, and is well known within the Urdu literary community for his poetry, literary criticism and innovations in the traditional poetry forms. His work does that rare thing of dealing with the reality of being Black in Pakistan, during a period of immense political and social upheaval, and writing truthfully about Black lives in Urdu.
Danish was born in 1958 to a Makrani Baloch family in Lyari, a poor and socially active part of Karachi. The Makrani Baloch are descendants of the Bantu tribes of Southeast Africa who came to the Indian subcontinent mostly as slaves, but also as merchants, sailors and mercenaries, from the late 18th to the mid-19th centuries. They settled on the Makran coast of Balochistan, which is in present-day Pakistan, and are often confused with Siddis, another African-descended group who settled in the neighboring Sindh province.
“In Karachi, people would ask me how I speak such ‘clean’ Urdu. They would sometimes mistake me for a foreigner,” Danish told New Lines, sitting next to a small lake near his home in Connecticut, reflecting on growing up Black in Pakistan. “The color, the sheer diversity of the country is lost or hidden in plain sight because people don’t have the knowledge to understand what exists beyond their experience,” he added.
Danish was involved in political organizing from childhood. His Karachi neighborhood of Lyari was a center of socialist and communist politics and also the birthplace of Baloch nationalism. It is in this milieu that Danish first started writing poetry. He helped found the Lyari Naujawaan Tehreek (Lyari Youth Movement), a civic organization which is still active, with his friends, and later served as the head of the Baloch Student Organization-Awami, a prominent Marxist-Leninist formation in Karachi.
“As a Baloch, our relationship to Balochistan and Makran was close. Lyari was always connected to Balochistan. Lyari was the center of Baloch politics, whether it be political, cultural or linguistic. I was surrounded by politically mature and politically developed people. All my classmates, people who studied with me, became members of the Baloch liberation struggle,” Danish said.
He was also a renowned student debater who competed on the debate circuit in Pakistan. His fiery oratory style suited political rallies well. When Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorial regime inspired opposition, Danish was often asked to perform his poetry at marches around Karachi. “The traditional Urdu poets, who’d read at mushairas [poetry symposiums], would chastise me as a debater, not a poet!” Danish said.
But his poetry was received glowingly in mushairas and literary circles, just as much as it was on the streets. At the 1985 Golden Jubilee of the Progressive Writers Association in London, Sibte Hassan, one of the association’s founders and among the most prominent Urdu poets in the world, lionized Danish’s poetry as exceptional among new poets. This was when Danish was only 27. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, a leading Urdu literary figure and critic, liked his poetry so much that he confessed to a mutual friend he was scared that Danish would stop writing poetry.
With his poetry laced with anger, cynicism and existentialism, Danish is known for articulating the Black experience in Urdu. His work is quite literally without precedent because he is the only Urdu poet within the Negritude tradition, which emphasizes consciousness of the Black condition.
His work engages with Blackness as he writes of feeling like a foreigner in his own country, which challenges both native and diaspora notions of belonging. But his work also draws on the political climate of Karachi during the turbulence of the 1970s and the 1980s, when military dictator Zia-ul-Haq imposed martial law and student politics was at its zenith.
Despite the groundbreaking nature of his work, however, much of it remains uncollected, scattered among different magazines, literary reviews and newspapers. “Bache, Titli, Phool” (“Children, Butterflies, Flowers”), published in 1997, remains his only book and was reissued last year. A collection of structured Urdu “ghazals” and free-verse “nazms,” it captured his distinctive cynicism, exploring ideas of existentialism and realism and reflecting deeply on memory and belonging.
It was at the American Central Library in Karachi that Danish discovered “Copper Sun,” a poetry collection written by Countee Cullen, a writer associated with the early Harlem Renaissance, which had an important role in the development of the Negritude tradition.
This tradition includes stalwarts like Aime Cesaire and Leon-Gontran Damas, who explored ideas of home and Black identity for the Black diaspora, through a Marxist lens and using a surrealist style. For Cesaire, “home” was not just a physical location, but also a cultural and spiritual space suspended in time, a place of belonging and self-discovery for Black people, particularly those in the African diaspora. The discovery of this movement was important for Danish in thinking through the complex spheres of Blackness and Baloch identity that he inhabited.
“The only thing I wish to say about my short poems is that being a Black Baloch and being from Lyari has made it such that many of my experiences are distinct from other Urdu poets.” The three poems contained in his poetry collection “can thus be joined and read with Negritude,” Danish wrote in the preface.
He asserted that he wrote within the Negritude tradition not to be fashionable, but because he had not seen Urdu poems written in it. He was aware he was doing something different, which was not the “problem of the average Urdu writer.”
“That’s why I don’t know how these poems will be perceived!” he wrote.
Haider Shahbaz, a doctoral student in comparative literature at UCLA who studies expressions of Africa and Blackness in Urdu, was drawn to Danish’s poetry precisely because of its discussions of race. “He talks very explicitly in his poems about being Black and the Black body. He is changing literary representations of African Blackness in Urdu,” said Shahbaz, who has translated Danish’s work into English.
For instance, in “Badsurti ka Husn” (“The Beauty of Ugliness”), Danish provokes the reader to “spit on my face,” comparing his dark complexion to the standard of beauty that situates whiteness as desirable. He also excoriates the violence that originates from that standard, while drawing critical attention to the hypocrisy of humanity’s enlightenment given the extent of oppression against Black people:
This Blackness
on which every line
on which every root of hair, is written
the story of man’s oppression.
His so-called narrative of innocence and generosity
marks his enlightenment.
Recurring motifs relate much of Danish’s work to the Negritude tradition in a less direct way. Many diasporic Africans have found a semblance of home in the ocean, which plays a crucial role in Negritude literature as representing both the pain of forced removal and the enduring resilience of the Black diaspora. This imagery is seen in Danish’s work, too, such as in his poem “Lyari,” when he describes his childhood neighborhood’s connection with the rest of Karachi in a searing attempt to locate home in a changing environment:
It was you
who laid your head on the bosom of the sea
and first poured its love
into your own soul.
Your attachment to the sea
Your love of the sea
is not a fiction.
The cottage was the sea
where you are sleeping.
The world was the sea
where you are lost.
The sea: a cruel tyrant.
But in its heart,
there is only a mother’s love for you.
In other poems, he used assorted moods that both describe the Black experience and communicate his cynical perspective on the world. “He often works with the imagery of the night, or darkness, even when he’s not explicitly talking about race,” Shahbaz said. This can be seen in the poem “Ihtijaj” (“Protest”), where he claims he will “spread darkness” on the streets in a revolutionary fervor, contrasting it with the oppression of light.
In another poem, he speaks of a “sad shadow” which visits “in the middle of the night”:
There are no lotuses of light in our children’s unripened eyes
That sad shadow comes and says this to me in the middle of the night.
Only the slum-dwellers suffer the cruelty of the blazing sun
I had not thought of this reality in the day, this I dreamt in the middle of the night.
This interplay of light and dark in Danish’s poetry points to earlier writers like Cullen, whom Danish discovered all those years ago. In “From the Dark Tower,” a poem in “Copper Sun,” Cullen explicitly connects the beauty of the night sky to Black beauty, metaphorically indicating that night-blooming flowers cannot survive in the day.
But in the above poem, “In the Middle of the Night,” Danish is also expressing his solidarity with the working class, a theme operative throughout his work. This is why his poetry continues to be heard at protests in Pakistan, such as the March Against Baloch Genocide in 2023.
The political becomes more explicit in other poems. In “Kutta Bhaunkta Hai” (“The Dog Barks”), Danish employs an extended allusion to depict an invader who has crushed all resistance in a city. Despite the passivity of the residents, however, natural objects in the city, like a street dog, continue to protest.
Tonight,
in front of the pillager of the city,
everyone bows down in acquiescence,
no one gives the call to prayer.
(Yet) in the desolate streets of the old city
A dog barks.
This poem became famous during protests against Zia-ul-Haq in Karachi, and it was this poetic spirit that later brought Danish fame when he moved to New York. “The poetry he was writing while living in New York City, it was obvious that it was a different kind of poetry that was not happening yet,” said Tahira Naqvi, a professor of Urdu at New York University. “I would say that he started a modern trend. In that crowd of poets, his was a completely new voice.”
“Danish was never attracted to the typical love poetry Urdu is known for. In Danish’s poetry, you will find the city: characters from slums, laborers who have been oppressed, working-class folks who are stuck in cycles of poverty,” said Saeed Naqvi, an Urdu poet and interlocutor with whom Danish established the New York chapter of Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq, an Urdu literary organization founded in 1939 in British India.
Among the Urdu literary circles in New York City, he became known for his postmodern interpretation of classical Urdu forms, his particularly world-weary yet discerning way of writing, his leftist perspective and a spectacular command of the language. The complexity of thought in his political poetry, including his sympathy for the oppressed, brought him numerous followers and fans.
“When I first met him, unlike nearly all the poets I had met in New York City, and I mean some very good poets, I realized he was a scholar. He knew the canon exceptionally well. Most of our early conversations were on literature and literary theory,” Tahira Naqvi said. His knowledge of literary criticism, linguistics, literature and theory set him apart from most people. “In my opinion, in North America, there is no other Urdu poet who is a scholar in the way Danish is,” she asserted.
Since he moved to the United States, Danish has grown more interested in literary criticism, which he has produced much more prodigiously than his poetic work. While it is his poetry that brought Danish popularity, he has recently garnered recognition in Urdu literary circles for his literary criticism essays, despite not having a conventional career in academia. With the help of a few friends, Danish is now compiling a collection, set to be released later this year.
Danish is similarly interested in continuing to modernize both the restrictive ghazal and freer nazm formats, bringing them closer together. He is also quite skeptical of the poetic form in general, mistrusting its ability to accurately depict reality, especially when it comes to violence. This is part of the reason he has nearly stopped writing poetry altogether.
Though he criticizes Urdu progressive poets for writing for popularity, he is interested in new ways of writing in the Urdu ghazal form — ways that go beyond merely expressing the individual. It is also this collective consciousness he brings to the nazm form. “I did not accept progressiveness in literature as a mere cliche,” said Danish.
By the 1990s, Danish had become a well-known scholar teaching at Karachi Urdu University (now Federal Urdu University). He was also a respected leftist who participated in the city’s many intellectual and literary circles. But an incident prompted him to leave Karachi.
Danish applied for a prestigious job teaching Urdu at the University of Karachi. Since he was already a professor at Urdu University, he was considered the top contender for the post. The author and literary giant Aslam Farrukhi, known for his work on popular 13th-century Sufi saints Nizamuddin Auliya and Baba Farid, who sat on the interview board, had already congratulated him.
But administrative politics stopped his appointment. A series of interfering actions, which included additional tests and requirements, left Danish bewildered. Someone even intercepted a letter addressed to him. “Why did this happen? One, I was different from them, racially and linguistically. There was also an ideological difference. I was a recognized progressive, and university politics were ruled by right-wing Jamiat forces,” alleged Danish, referring to the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba, one of the largest student organizations in Pakistan.
Any hope he had of staying in Pakistan evaporated. His wife had family in Connecticut, and they thought it was best for their children to go, too.
But when he landed in suburban America, he was shocked. “Where were the people? What kind of America is this? I just saw roads. It was when I got on the bus to New York, the first time I entered Harlem, I realized that I was now in America. I decided to move my family to the city,” Danish said.
After working as a security guard for two years, Danish landed a job teaching Urdu at New York University (NYU) in 2002 with the help of Tahira Naqvi. These were “splendid years” for Danish. He could not help but compare the respect NYU accorded him to his experience in Karachi.
Living in Kew Gardens, a diverse residential neighborhood in Queens, he became a prominent fixture at Urdu literary events in the city and also invested in community programs beyond the Urdu community.
He read his poetry at the First International Poetry Festival in 2003, in conjunction with literary stalwarts such as Black avant-garde mainstay Steve Cannon and Palestinian poet Natalie Handel. When the Iraq War started, he participated in another event, organized by Queens-based Palestinian poet Paul Catafago, called the East-West Festival, in May 2005. “Your entire perspective changes when you perform within this multinational context; you’re able to distance all delusions you had about the world,” Danish said.
In 2006, however, when NYU ran out of funding for Danish’s job, he began working as a security guard again. “Danish is a leftist, so there was never a caste thing about something being a good job or a bad job,” said Catafago, who would visit Danish during his night shifts and talk about poetry, literature and theory for hours on end.
“But this is someone who should have been teaching at a university,” he added. “To me, it felt like he thought there was a lot of discrimination. He was an immigrant speaking with an accent, he was Black, and he had a disability from having polio as a child. In a society that is supposedly not discriminatory, I think he felt that he was discriminated against.”
After a series of applications, Danish found work as a language consultant for the Urdu and Balochi languages at the University of Maryland, but he left that job because he was unable to find the same passion for language in a bureaucratized context.
His wife wished to be closer to her sister, so in 2011 they moved back to Connecticut. He grew reclusive but continued to churn out literary criticism and occasionally traveled to perform at mushairas.
“Back where I started,” Danish said, smiling while referring to his return to Connecticut. “Spiritually speaking, I have always believed there are things that are written in our destiny. You can’t change them, they are meant for you.”
“When I came back to Connecticut, I felt that nature was telling me to go through a different experience, an experience that required me to be in solitude, to be lonely,” said Danish, with a hint of asceticism. “I could not do that in New York. I could not do that in Karachi. Through solitude, a way of thinking, a new perspective to look at life came through in Connecticut.”
His wife passed away in 2020, and his daughter recently married and moved away. He lives alone next to a gorgeous yet secluded lake. Danish waved me off when I asked him if he would return to Queens anytime soon, voicing the same axiom about destiny. But then he admitted that he has never forgotten New York.
“Obviously, it’s a city your heart always wants to go to. New York has no comparison in the world. No comparison. Let’s see, if destiny allows, I will go back,” he said.
At the Zafar Zaidi Memorial Mushaira, an Urdu poetry recital series that went on for 40 years and had its final edition in September 2024, Danish received a lifetime achievement award. He performed the title poem from his only collection.
Before it began, he spoke of Gaza. “I wrote and performed this poem 40 years ago in Karachi. It is difficult to have a poet’s perspective in the face of such brutal violence, especially against innocent children. But the images coming out of Gaza, out of Palestine, make me think of these verses,” he said.
With his stereotypical old debater style, he swayed with his words:
“I see a jungle, in that jungle dance children, butterflies, flowers. I see a vision, in that vision are immured children, butterflies, flowers.”
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